The man who once started the Canadian Nazi Party now lives in a little green house on Newcastle Road, in the cottage-country town of Minden. The Red Ensign flag is raised outside his porch. A white sign on the lawn advertises the paralegal business he ran until December, and spells out his name in black letters: John Beattie.

Fifty years ago, Beattie was infamous for leading Nazi rallies in Toronto that descended into violence. In 1966, hundreds of police officers had to guard the 24-year-old at Allan Gardens as he shouted anti-Semitic slogans at a mob of 1,500 protesters. At a rally three years later a protester clubbed him unconscious with a pair of binoculars.

Beattie founded the Canadian Nazi Party in 1965, and shortly after was jailed for six months for placing swastikas on the lawns of prominent Jewish residents. In 1972 he worked as an OPP informant, spying on other right-wing groups. He ran for mayor of Toronto in 1978 on a platform of white-only housing.

Today, Beattie is running for deputy reeve of the Township of Minden Hills, population 5,600. He’s quite mad about a water tower project that went over budget.

On a sunny afternoon, the 72-year-old was sitting on his porch cutting into a pork chop covered in kidney beans, explaining why white people are superior. He looked gaunt from recent health problems, and spoke with a Clint Eastwood grimace.

“We were the first in space, most of the inventions were by white people,” he said. “With our administrative abilities, the world was better off when the British ran things.”

Beattie likes to boast that Minden is a “white village” where he can be among his own kind. In reality, he lives next door to a Mexican woman who drapes her country’s flag across her porch railing.

Anabel Briseno said she brings him a plate of food every Christmas and Thanksgiving. She knows his views, having lived beside him for 15 years, but also knows he’s lived alone since his wife died of cancer.

“I just like to share,” she said.

Suwan Khamduang, who runs the local Thai restaurant, said Beattie’s had takeout food from the restaurant multiple times, despite his claim he avoids non-white establishments.

“This kind of thing is from 100 years ago,” she said. “Why would you close your mind like that? It makes me feel sad — sad for him.”

Beattie’s return to the public spotlight brings up bad memories for longtime residents of Minden.

In 1989, shortly after Beattie moved to the town, he hosted what he called a celebration of John A. Macdonald. About 100 white supremacists gathered on his rural property while skinhead bands played. The two-day event ended with the burning of a giant cross.

“We got wind of it because of posters in Toronto,” said Jack Brezina, who then owned and edited the local newspaper, the Minden Times.

Brezina still has the editorial the paper published as a rallying cry: “As a citizen of Canada and a member of this community, I believe in the equality of all individuals regardless of race, colour, creed, religion or ethnic origin.”

In 2011, residents heard Beattie was planning another Canada Day rally, and the uproar led to its cancellation.

“It’s a slap in the face,” Brezina said of Beattie’s decision to run. “This man laid a major stain on this community back in the first rally, and tried to do it again the second time. People still say, ‘Oh, I know Minden, that’s where that rally was.’ ”

Beattie describes the six years he spent goose-stepping around Allan Gardens as misadventures fuelled by alcoholism. He maintains he was manipulated by the Canadian Jewish Congress into starting the Canadian Nazi Party, for the goal of getting hate-speech laws passed.

“With every grain of truth you can build a hill of lies,” said Bernie Farber, a former CEO of the CJC. He said the CJC had just hired a private detective to determine the group’s strength and sabotage its efforts.

Beattie has told another version of how he became a Nazi, one that doesn’t include a Jewish conspiracy. In 1972, when he first renounced Nazism, he told Star columnist Alexander Ross how he used to sit in on trials at Osgoode Hall, noticing how rich people were given lenient sentences.

The teenage Beattie had also come across anti-Semitic pamphlets written by Ron Gostick, a far-right organizer from Alberta. Later, walking by the mansions of Forest Hill, Beattie wondered whether the wealthy residents had ever worked as hard as his grandfather did, Ross wrote.

“The word ‘Jew’ just hit my head,” Beattie told Ross. “It came out of me. I didn’t say it then, but I’m telling you right now.”

Nobody the Star talked to in Minden thinks Beattie will win, but Farber said it’s a mistake to treat the candidacy as a joke.

“A deputy reeve is a serious position,” he said.

Beattie says his court work has redeemed him locally, and that his personal views are separate from his professional life.

“As a paralegal, I feel I cleaned the slate because I dealt with everybody, or the Law Society would have kicked me out,” he said. “I had no problem with Jewish judges, Jewish clients who were in the area. The people in the town know me.”

But Beattie still networks with white-rights activists around the world, using his personal website. He produces short YouTube videos, expounding the same kind of propaganda that radicalized him in his youth.

In the past few months Beattie’s done lengthy interviews with a former Ku Klux Klan leader and a self-described national socialist from Britain.

He isn’t planning on door-knocking for the municipal campaign, and says he has no money. Fifty years ago, his Nazi organizing was also done with little funding and few supporters. At least one thing has stayed constant: a lack of resources has never stopped John Beattie from stirring up hatred and conflict.

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